“You were saying but yesterday that the fish were growing smaller in the lagoon,” replied she, glancing with head aside at the progress of her work, as a woman might glance at a picture she is painting.
“I know,” he replied, “but what are you doing that for?”
“This will bring big fish to the lagoon,” replied she darkly.
She saw, as she spoke, not the grotesque ju-ju she was gazing at, but the sun-blaze on the waters of Karolin, the azure and chatoyancy of those depths where the gulls were always fishing, the great distances, where a mind could soar in freedom, resting on nothing, caring for nothing, heedless of everything. She saw the wind and the sun and the breakers falling on the coral. For the people there she had no more feeling than she had for Dick or the departed Kearney; they were to her only as shadows or ghosts. The place was everything.
Perhaps the old Egyptians knew how to practise the taminan tabu and used it on cats with partial effect or an effect that has worn out through the ages—cats, for whom places are more real than people, who live in so strange a world of their own, almost beyond human touch.
She could see, as she worked, the big canoes landing and taking her back. As for what they might do to Dick, she neither thought nor cared.
“But how?” asked Dick.
“I will show you,” said she; “but first get me what I want.”
She gave him some directions and off he went to the groves, taking the axe with him, returning in half an hour or so dragging after him an eight-foot sapling, straight as a fishing rod, four inches thick at the base and tapering gradually to its extremity.
She examined the point of the sapling. Then, making a hole at the base of the cocoanut, she drove the point in so that the thing was fixed on tight. Then between them they carried the affair to the dinghy, placed it long-ways with the frightful face staring down at the water over the stern, got in, and pushed off.